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Special events and celebrations
October: We all wear Halloween costumes for our costume parade and have a little festival where each mother brings a fun thing to do like pumpkin bowling or apple bobbing and we have a potluck lunch. We also bring little non-candy treats for their trick-or-treat bags. And, we bring nuts and dried fruit to add to “gorp” we make in a giant cauldron.
November: The children cook a Thanksgiving feast. Each mother helps with a part of the preparations like shucking corn, making rolls, apple peeling for the apple crisp, corn bread muffins, etc. Afterwards we all sit down to sing “make new friends” and eat our feast. Our theme is friendship.
December: We go caroling at the Senior Center and have a gift exchange and potluck for our holiday party. Our theme is “giving of the heart”.
February: We have a Valentine’s card exchange. We celebrate with a potluck lunch and celebration.
April: We do an egg hunt and have a potluck party. We learn about what kinds of animals hatch out of eggs.
May: The children prepare the lunch for their mothers and serve them at our Mother’s Day Tea Party.
June: We have our final performance and picnic which includes a wonderful performance with singing, dancing and solos by the students followed by a barbeque picnic and games including potato sack races, balloon toss, tug of war and piñata.
Birthday celebrations: The child does our traditional “birthday walk”. The mom brings a small treat to share and a poster with photographs from each year of the child’s life. We do a special ceremony and song that includes talking about each year of the child’s life. It’s certainly a special moment for the child and is a learning opportunity as well about the passage of time, seasons and months.
Art
We believe in the “process” of art that allows a child to play in the paint, but also in the “product” of art to create something of lasting value that is a keepsake for the parent. We often use the finger painting paper as a backdrop for a collage and that page becomes part of a book on apples. Or we use the sponge painting paper as a layer of art that becomes a collage piece in their “Van Gogh”. It is “process” art because it provides the student with exploration of different kinds of mediums. Children love to get their hands in the paint and enjoy the process of squishing it as a tactile experience. And, it is “product” art because we use it to create something of lasting value that is a keepsake book or finished collage. I love to make the art into books because it then also becomes a literacy piece.
We go to Robin Ann’s house a few times a year on field trips to make “masters based” art projects. We have done Van Gogh, Monet, Jackson Pollack, Georgia O’Keefe and Andy Warhol. It’s great to get a “Jackson Pollack” splatter-painted canvas that your child made you as a gift. It’s amazing to see our children on their field trip to the Getty run over to the Monet in the gallery pointing and shouting “Monet”! Or, identifying the lily pad pond at Descanso Gardens as “it looks like Monet’s garden!”
Every year we book our own special time at a ceramics studio to make one-of-a-kind keepsake handprints out of ceramics, as well as, a wind chime and ceramic pendants for our Mother’s Day necklaces.